Skepticism

EVENTS

Creationism is a marketing game

And they know it. Ken Ham has started a new billboard campaign for the creation “museum”, with a variety of different designs, all featuring prehistoric* creatures as draws to get kids and family to attend. Here are some examples:

Notice what’s smart about them? They’re focused, featuring an element that they clearly know is a key draw, dinosaurs; they’re eye-catching; they’re professionally designed and have thematic unity; and the Creation “Museum” knows that good marketing is a way to get people to come in to their propaganda mill. You know they invested a good chunk of money in this effort.

…just like everything else we do at the Creation Museum, they are done professionally—first class!

To make matters even worse, he goes on sneer at the feeble efforts of real museums, and to mock several atheist billboard campaigns, posting examples of some of the worst. And the sad thing is — and you won’t hear me saying this very often — Ken Ham is right. Real museums are strapped for cash, and most of their money is going into curating scientific collections and paying scientists to do work for them, while atheist organizations are actually small time compared to the multi-million dollar operating budget of a commercial enterprise like the Creation “Museum”.

Ham doesn’t have a clue about any of the things real museums do. When an NCSE spokesperson says he wishes more science museums could engage in this kind of promotion, Ham whimpers defensively.

You mean our government-funded (using our tax money) Smithsonian would not have a marketing budget as big as the marketing budget of the Creation Museum? And what about all the other secular museums (no doubt most are funded by our tax dollars) such as the Chicago Field Museum and New York Natural History Museum—and the many, many others!

The Smithsonian, the AMNH, and the Field Museum are not about marketing! They’re institutions doing science. Ham is confused in thinking that his freak show exhibit and monument to bunkum is anything like those places. He does not have a museum, he owns a sideshow attraction!

The article reveals Ken Ham’s ignorance in so many ways. He really doesn’t understand the difference, and he doesn’t comprehend why scientists might be worried about his campaign.

As of writing this blog post, an Associated Press article about our new dinosaur billboards has appeared on many news sites, including ABC News and the Washington Post. The AP article and many blogs indicate that secularists are concerned about them. Isn’t it amazing that they are so worried about one Creation Museum. Think of all the hundreds of secular museums and thousands of secular schools, colleges, and universities where evolution and millions of years are taught as fact—and the secularists are really worried AiG’s Creation Museum! That shows how insecure they really are. Secularists just can’t stand it when information they have censored from the public is being disseminated by us. And they don’t want people thinking for themselves; they want them to swallow their anti-God religion!

Those billboards and his “museum” are not disseminating censored information. Information about creationism is freely available all over, and gets routinely spread in a common American institution, church. We are worried because Ken Ham is spending buckets of money disseminating slickly-produced lies, while scientists are trying to do science. Lies are cheap and easy; the truth is harder to come by. That he follows the cheap and easy route means he has more money to sink into public relations.

We’re not worried that Ken Ham has some uncomfortable truth that he’s getting across to people. We’re worried that he’s an effective charlatan.

And really, it’s easy to see what a lying fraud he is. Did you notice one of the billboards in that montage above?

Yeah. Ken Ham claims that fire-breathing dragons were real.

*Well, actually, if Ken Ham were right, these are historic creatures that lived within the last 6,000 years.

Comments

Yes, Ham was born and bred in Australia (Queensland, in fact, the homophobiest Bible-beltiest place in the land) and we’re very very, truly, madly, deeply sorry – but the USA provided him with an environment where he could thrive.

Ken Ham is a business man. He will use science or leave it on the side of the road as he sees fit in the name of making money. He is no different than the corporations that dominate many aspects of the US at this point. Creationism is just his market niche that he is using to get that money.

I was driving around in my hometown of Milwaukee Wisconsin and I swear that I saw that one mastodon creation billboard. I was shocked at the time because I thought it was advertising for a new creation carnival for our town. Is the Ham accually spreading these billboards over the entire nation?

I remember Carl Baugh going on about the dragon thing back in the ’90s. It’s important to creationism, because Leviathan, described in Job 41, is a fire-breathing sea monster. And obviously, that’s a literally true story.

They could make life so much easier for themselves if they didn’t draw so much attention to the obviously stupid parts of the Bible.

The details have changed in the last century, but the archetypes haven’t:
The freak shows on the midway have become reality TV and the circus has come to Kentucky.
All they’re missing are the jugglers and acrobats. They do have a clown.http://thinkexist.com/quotes/p.t._barnum/

In addition to their tiny budgets, seems like atheist ad campaigns are almost uniformly hobbled by media who reject all the best ads as too offensive or controversial and shit. How many bus companies have rejected perfectly amusing ads? Kinda hard to run a good campaign that you’re not allowed to run.

> set_connection –src=”self” –tgt=”reality” –status=”offline”
.
problem sure… but there still are solutions
– the monster is amphibious and uses its biological flamethrower when on land
– the monster preys on low flying birds, it torches them when they are flying near sea surface and then eats them
– the monster spits out a mixture of fuel and oxidizer that is so exothermic that it burns even in water like thermite.
. > set_connection –src=”self” –tgt=”reality” –status=”online”
:-P

One of the ads that is not featured in the above photo montage (I can’t remember where I saw it, maybe in our local paper?) featured the “amazing Pterodactyl” – but the accompanying picture was clearly a Pteranodon. As there is nothing inherently evolutionary about the Linnaean taxonomic system, Ham and Co. shouldn’t be reluctant to use it. But those imbecilic tools can’t even be bothered to get the taxonomy of the (real) organisms featured in their “museum” correct! I should, however, try to establish taxonomic priority for “Kenhameus prometheus” for the “Fire-breathing dragon”, though. Now to find the appropriate journal….

And the lowest common denominator goes lower…and lower….and lower. Where it stops, only the fundietaliban knows. (But now WE know where all them damn unicorns went – the fire-breathing dragons got them. All of ‘em.) A reminder that it is not good to meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crispy and taste good with catsup. Ah! Knowledge…it’s a wonderful thing.

They also completely fucked up the brachiosaurus…. diplodocus or apatosaurus maybe but several obvious morphological problems with their depiction. There’s a bony crest thing that should be on the head and the front legs should be longer then the back.

I keep saying that christianity is not a religion but a marketing campaign. They’re exceptionally good at spreading their message, it’s written into their dogma and the commandments against lying (and stealing and killing) takes a distance second place when it comes to the commandments about who to worship. Remember, lying isn’t one of the seven deadly sins.

15 May 2012 – It is simply called the Noah’s Ark Theme Park, and the site selected for …

It seems that Ken Ham can’t raise the necessary funding for the Ark Park. … I asked how the state could still fund road and sewer improvements to the Ark Park when ….. The real problem, though, is the fact the Kentucky is putting its tax …

What’s with this “secular museums (no doubt most are funded by our tax dollars)”? I thought the AiG had received some healthy infusions of “our tax dollars” from the Commonwealth of Kentucky for it’s Creationists Sideshow. I think I just heard a pot calling a kettle black. At least the museums are expanding our knowledge of the world, not just making some scheming asshole richer.

Back when the Creation Science (sic) Institute was publishing dinosaur books, they included in each picture a family of cavemen looking through the grass at the animals. A pink father, a pink mother, and the requisite three pink little kids, all modestly dressed. Talk about propaganda – at least the billboards don’t have that in them.

But dragons are real! And now we call them dinosaurs! And they’re now endangered! And dictionaries used to admit this! (Sorry. I really should ignore crack-brained creationist videos, but some are so entertaining!)

I SAW one of those atrocities yesterday, as I was driving through Indianapolis on my way to take my daughter to Camp Quest. I literally gasped in horror – living in Indiana, I am used to seeing really stupid things on billboards in rural areas, but this one was right on 465, the main loop around Indy. Kinda depressing that this stuff is spreading!

No, they should be the same length. The famous skeleton in the museum in Berlin (…which is actually Giraffatitan, not Brachiosaurus; Brachiosaurus is a pretty different American animal…) is composed of several partial skeletons that weren’t the same size.

But, really, let’s not get started on the inaccuracies. “The super raptor” has its legs violently ripped apart, and the plucking must have been painful. Velociraptor had actual wings, you know; it had quill knobs on its forearms – attachment sites for large wing feathers. I could go on for quite some time. … OK, have a look at the head of the Triceratops, never even mind the hands and the feet.

Isn’t that “dragon” in the Bible derived from Tiamat, the Babylonian monster of chaos and goddess of the ocean? They better watch out idolizing Tiamat as some silly children’s fantasy. She can be quite ferocious and might just swallow Ken and company.

The reason we no longer have fire breathing dragons is very simple. The safety officer aboard the ark obviously wouldn’t allow fire on a wooden boat. The health officer agreed that smoking would be unhealthy. The engineer agreed that the stability of the ark would be compromised by the mass of 14 fire breathing dragons, clean animals (Genesis 7:2) as they had their own autoclave to sterilize everything in their vicinity.

We are worried because Ken Ham is spending buckets of money disseminating slickly-produced lies, while scientists are trying to do science. Lies are cheap and easy; the truth is harder to come by. That he follows the cheap and easy route means he has more money to sink into public relations.

Co-opting/repurposing/mutilating scientific discovery is a centuries-old religious practice. Way back in the day, mountains of gold were poured into ostentatious cathedrals built with astronomical features to wow the public into believing priests had a unique connection with God’s mysterious powers, while scientists like Galileo rotted away in jail unable to spread the truth among the public.

Ham is following an ancient, worn, and faded script. What really goads him and his ilk, I bet, is that secularists, scientists, and atheists have managed to re-write the ending. For the most part, people like him no longer have the power to imprison dissenters.

I saw one of these in my home neighborhood — which is in the gay district of Oakland, CA. At first I wondered if it was an error, and it was supposed to be in Oakland, MI. Now that I know it was all over the U.S., I can, while lamenting the spending of money on such a silly thing, at least be glad that it’s being wasted here — I can think of few places where the ad would be *less* effective.

Since medieval mythical bestiary creatures are admissable, I’d like to add my personal favourite to the Ken Ham taxonomy… Behold the mighty bonnacon:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnaconhttp://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast80.htm
It’s features are those of a large bull with the horns of a ram, but when threatened it unloads a gargantuan quantity of FLAMING NAPALM BULLSHIT which covers an area of three acres scorching everything in it’s wake.
Not sure why this seems so relevant here but perhaps Ken’s already working on the fibreglass mockup.

Thank you for that, my first LOL of the day. You may have posted that before but that was the first time I read it.

On the comparison between real and fake museums and their budgeting priorities, what this reminds me of is an exchange between characters in a Jones-Palin movie called Consuming passions. After the CEO of a chocolate factory hears the dietician he hired inform him that the chocolates have so many artificial ingredients in them that they “have no nutritional value whatsoever,” he explains, “That’s right, we’ve taken all that out and put the resources where they belong: marketing!”

Good stories are easier to market. It’s a pretty good story. Gilgamesh is better though. It has Huwawa. ““Huwawa’s roar is a flood, his mouth is death and his breath is fire!” Beat that with your damn dragons, Ken.

As a professional artist, I couldn’t help but giggle at Ken’s comment:

because when I first saw them, I couldn’t believe how bad they were. Fonts, color selection, silly images, and an unbelievably busy composition – I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see something like this taught to freshman graphic designers as an example of what NOT to do.

Hard to believe there is something so silly even fundie xians won’t finance it.

Strangely enough, the state of Kentucky is still spending $2 million dollars to build a road to the site.<==

within 5 years the theme park will be replaced by an appropriate christian themed real estate development I have no doubt.
it is a win win for the state who will have to green light it to try and recoup the funds spent on improvements or at least to save face.

It does raise an interesting question. Museums are set up as places of knowledge, not as attractions, but would the government do well to make some “museums” that are more like attractions so as to engage more people? Perhaps there’s something to outreach that’s being missed by having only museums as the institutions they are.

So where’s the Revelation museum? Much more interesting creatures, some with breastplates and shit; there would be trumpets blasting, plagues descending, more dragons, people with no heads…
And the billboards would scare the shit out of the children, which I understand is pretty much the whole point. What’s not to like?

The new ‘Lucy’ exhibit at the Creation Museum is fraudulent. It shows a knuckle-walking gorilla.

Please see:http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6018/750.abstract
“These features show that the A. afarensis foot was functionally like
that of modern humans and support the hypothesis that this species was
a committed terrestrial biped”.http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/ … 7.abstract
“These characteristics further establish that bipedality in
Australopithecus was highly evolved and that thoracic form differed substantially from that of either extant African ape”.

AiG have IGNORED (not refuted) BOTH these papers.

They have also ignored ALL my recent emails pointing out their cherry picking of evidence ie deception.

And where does the Bible say that God did not create the real Australopithecus afarensis or that the real version ‘proves’ evolution?

But they are propagandist Christians who ONLY think in black and white terms.

Ken Ham upset that real museums and scientific institutions might want to use tax money to advertise the truth. That’s rich. His temple of lies was built with the aid of generous tax exemptions and taxpayer funded grants. Maybe he should be required to maintain an extensive research collection and actually do research. Then again you wouldn’t need much room to store your Noah’s ark model and the bathtub you used for researching its flood-worthiness.

mandrellian, never let a chance go by to do some state bashing. Do you have some evidence that we are different? Thought not. Ken Hamm is a looney and an educated one at that. He was a Science Teacher and that only confirms his looneyness but that isn’t an indictment of an entire state. I have no evidence that Queenslanders are or aren’t different to our Southern Cousins, we just seem to have pockets where Loonies congregate. In Brisbane one of the areas is around Mansfield where COC Christian Outreach Centre is located. One way to get there is via Ham Road into Wecker Road (or is that Wacker). COC is Happy Clappers Central.

Got one of those ugly Triceratops billboards up on the east side of St. Paul, MN, visible from east bound I-94. Yet another reason to avoid the freeway. It really is like seeing Wall Drug signs around the country.

I’ve been saying for some time that Ham’s outfit is blowing us out of the water in terms of billboards. Think of the impact those billboards have on a young child in the back seat on the highway, and the force of their pleas to go see the dinosaurs on the exhausted parents driving. Then of the horror show they’ll be funneled into with no way out but through once they get there. Pure evil.

I guess I’ve seen this for a while because I live nearby, so I’ve been seeing their billboards for years. Meanwhile, the local science museum and zoo have pretty weak billboards by comparison. But I’m certain they don’t have near the marketing budget the Creation “Museum” does. And the abortive attempt at an atheist billboard here was scrapped when threats were made against the property owner where it was to be located. It was supposed to just be moved, but the new location was on my daily commute, and I never saw it there….

I don’t much care about our billboards, they just need to be clean, simple, and let local atheists know they’re not alone. I think that’s the most we can expect from them. But I do wish the zoo and science museum could get better (and more) billboards to lure people away from Ham’s schlock fest. The reality of what’s on offer is so different from the marketing show: really bad drawing of a fire breathing dragon vs. real life komodo dragon. Chintzy triceratops you can sit on vs. Enormous mammoth skeleton. Terrifying horror town meant to scare you into Christianity with false claims of the effects of non religion vs. Really cool cave you can crawl and climb through over and over.

Yeah, Ham’s going to lure them in, then they’re going to be sorely disappointed. I would bet anything, however, that in spite of better billboards, Ham’s visitor numbers are a fraction of those at either Museum Center or the Cincinnati Zoo. So maybe marketing isn’t everything, and we’re winning after all.

How would the physiology of a fire breathing dragon work exactly? I guess you could ferment plant matter with the right kind of bacteria and then store methane in the gut for later use but what would you have to develop to cause a spark to ignite it. Could it be some kind of electric discharge in the mouth that would cause an arc at the time the dragon belches forth the methane. You would probably need some kind of mechanism to stop blow back as this would not end well for the dragon.

paleotrent:
I think you are onto something. It’s horribly ad homonym, but surely we could put together a paper on a new species of hominid “Kenhameus anencephalus” based on the recognition/biological species concept that any ‘normal’ human would never reproduce with such a monstrosity. A few nice physical descriptions along the anecephalus line, large mouth, vocalise with loud incomprehensible booming; habitat/habit: live in the dark, feed on ignorance and paranoia, possible biological control is being looked into…
could be a nice little publication! ;)
The only sad thing is that if it were published in a ‘real’ journal, he’d never see it…

The funniest thing about it was the tagline “902 miles ahead!” Is that supposed to be a selling point?

Well, we all know where anti-Biblical “hundreds of miles” type thinking leads. So just apply some basic creationist math…

(6000/13750000000)*(902*5280*12)

to arrive at the real number, which is just under 25 inches. It’s actually right next to the billboard!

If you want to dispute my related finding that the Earth’s circumference is no more than 60 feet total, then bear in mind that there have been literally hundreds of instances in which scientific length-measuring instruments had some very inaccurate results, and this entitles me to make up any number I please. Also, relativity means accelerated objects, like the Earth moving through space, are compressed!